With the always-increasing amount of documents one has to deal with on a daily basis it becomes harder to manage the documents (or information or file) on an item-by-item basis. An alternative document management system adapted to organize large amount of information would be beneficial to the user.
United States Patent Application Publication No.: US 2007/0214169 A1, published on Sep. 13, 2007, which is incorporated herein by reference, discloses a multi-dimensional locating system and method (title). The patent application provides embodiments for managing and displaying axes of documents and other computer-readable files. An axis of documents grouping a plurality of documents along a predetermined order, inter alia, is taught.
The use of an axis of documents brings some specific behavior as oppose to document presentation mechanism in the art. One of the specific of an axis is that one might want to navigate thereon while making selections of documents and seeing a magnified version of a document.
The use of a small number of axes of information elements on a display might result in a non-optimal use of the usable display area. A larger number of axes might be desirable to provide more information to a viewer. A number of challenges need to be addressed in order to provide functions performed on a larger quantity of documents. For instance, axes of documents can take significant space on a display and some cases of use can require displaying a plurality of axes simultaneously on a display. This might clutter the display area while it might not be required to completely see all the axes all the time on the display area.
Also, an axis of information elements can group a plurality of information elements having a commonality. The discrimination of information elements required to be displayed on the axis might change depending of the task to be made. Some tasks might require a more detailed distribution of information elements while some other tasks might require fewer details associated with the same information elements. In some cases significant details are required for a time period and the level of details can be reduced for the remaining time while the information elements remain available for further inquiry or filtering.
In view of the prior art it appears that improvements over the prior art is desirable to improve the user experience and usability either with innovative graphical, structural or functional improvements.